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OCTOBER 12 VHS MOVIE REVIEW : AMERICAN CYBORG (1993)
From dead4movie.com
American Cyborg – the American trash “B” leveled sci-fi movie produced and promoted by the same movie studio Cannon Films (Cyborg-1989). By the way, “B” means Best movie.
First of all, don’t you see any resemblance with the Terminator I? Look at the picks, the director was definitely under Cameron’s impression here. Of course, doing a job about cyborgs, broken metal hands and red eyes you would eventually fall under the Terminator category.
The movie was aired right after successful T2 Judgment Day in hope to make the same box office revenue, or at least close to the T2 success. However, it actually bombed in gross offices like a nuclear blast, earning only a half of million. But does that fact makes a movie sucks?
Let’s look closer at the American Cyborg. First of all, that title sounds already cheesy, why use word “American”? Does it will sound more intimidating if we name the original Terminator with libel like American Terminator?
First of all, I don’t think that the villain’s actor (the evil cyborg) was intimidating enough. Look at him, isn’t that guy a plumber from your neighborhood? Shitty casting? Now, take a look at the main character, he looks more like a Tarzan – sexy and wild gay guy. But I will give him a credit. He acts naturally and holds you in a chair. Maybe, one those actors whom we can call a natural born actor. The man really can roll out in any shitty situation.
The American Cyborg’s world is an adventurous world! Just dive in and participate in an electronic drug contest and whore show under the umbrellas of the post-apocalyptic flea market. We have rebels, “radioactive leeches”, a strange gang of homosexuals and transvestites directly from the Clockwork Orange movie, a gang of hungry factory clan, an acid rain pouring out of nowhere and wild cannibals who are ready to tear apart any leaving creature laying on the ground without movement. And my God, I do not recommend you to even take a little snooze in that world, because dangerous radical forces are everywhere in this movie! Enemies are everywhere!
The strong points of the movie are creepy locations, dark backgrounds and the music. The music is really epic and locations of the devastated city are really scaring a shit of you. I even can say that they are closer to the first Terminator and Cyborg (1989). At least for me, they are more natural and convincing than in Escape from New York.
OCTOBER 12 VHS MOVIE REVIEW : AMERICAN CYBORG (1993)
From moviecynics.com
Cannon films had been patriotic enough to give us American Ninjas, Samurais and Kickboxers but this last gasp of stale air signaled that it was the end and that it was time to go. With Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus gone, Michael Dudikoff refusing to do American Ninja 5, and Chuck Norris becoming a TV star, Cannon was indeed a former shell of its cheeseball genius that provided this viewer with much enjoyment in his youth. While I can’t say I loved all of Cannon’s work, these guys were behind such cheeseball classics as American Ninja 1-2, Avenging Force, Invasion USA, Delta Force, Death Wish 3-4, Missing In Action 1-2, Cyborg and Kickboxer and let’s not even get into Cobra and Bloodsport. As far as I’m concerned, when Cannon fell, the action genre suffered a huge blow. American Cyborg: Steel Warrior is proof positive that the spirit of goofy bad cinema had died and left us stale clichés that vaguely resembled the old Cannon product but which had been stripped of any of the campy, fun element that these flicks thrived on.
The movie stars Joe Lara, who seems like a low budget rip off of Lorenzo Lamas. By the way, how does one become a rip off of Lorenzo Lamas? What? Was Jeff Speakman too manly to rip off? Anyway, he plays some type of warrior in the apocalypse who has to steal the last fertile woman in Europe away from the cyborgs, who have enslaved humanity. Along the way, they are chased by a robot, Joe Lara saves the girl from a cannibal cult, battles thugs in an abandoned factory and basically play with any cliché you can thing of in the durable action genre.
Now this plot is ripped off from Hell Comes to Frogtown, Cyborg, Escape From New York, The Terminator, and Mad Max. Of course, the difference is that it lacks the imagination of any of the latter three and the fun factor of the former two. This is a movie in which Joe Lara escorts a woman who has her baby in a jar. Why Europe is the destination is anyone’s guess, why cyborgs are in power is never explained, and how people are infertile is also unexplained, indeed the set up for this mindless rip off is so based on clichés, that the movie doesn’t even bother to explain why so and so got this way. It’s a movie that exists solely for those who watch infomercials late at night, it’s so dull and dreary that the movie fails to build any momentum.
The cast is also dull, with John Ryan the best, as he at least has somewhat of a presence as a killer cyborg, yet he gives the best performance simply by default. Since he doesn’t speak, he acts circles around Nicole Hansen and Joe Lara. This movie was in fact so boring to me, I started to ponder how actors feel being in movies like this. I mean if you have a dream to be in films and you got your big break, but then looked at how shoddy the production around you is, how does your heart not break? Sure some stars started in Grade Z material, but 99% of the time it doesn’t happen. After all, has anyone heard from Nicole Hansen? I guess that actors in these films become stuntmen or trainers, and women become nude stand-ins or get married, squeeze out some children and give up on acting. In the case with this cast, one doesn’t object to such career choices.
As Cannon’s last effort though, this movie is pretty dismal. This studio was the king in the 1980s as it had Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson, Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Michael Dudikoff and both the licenses for Marvel and DC comics, how they fell apart and were relegated to this type of crap (Not to mention Hellbound, American Ninja 5 etc) is more saddening than anything else. The reason is of course is because Golan and Globus had to get ambitious and make Shakespeare and “serious” movies that never sold. Had they stuck with what they were good at, things would’ve been different.
As for this movie, it’s a total bomb, a movie lacking effort from all involved. Everybody in this movie was in on the fact that the movie was joke and in the end that’s just what it was.
American Cyborg
2/10
OCTOBER 12 VHS MOVIE REVIEW : AMERICAN CYBORG (1993)
From movieguide.org
Content:
(C, Ab, A/D, LL, VVV) A strained Christian allegory with a reverence for life as a fetus & twisted symbolism; i.e., the virgin Mary as saving humanity through a test-tube baby; implied drug taking; 3 obscenities & 10 curses; generous portions of violence: and, impalings, decapitations, knifings, martial arts & drum-firing gun shots.
Summary:
AMERICAN CYBORG: STEEL WARRIOR is yet another science-fiction tale about the future of the human race based on the battle to end all battles. However, the movie is crippled by excessive darkness of lighting which obscures rather than enhances the action, cheap special effects, jarring editing, claustrophobic sets, repetitive music, and stilted performances.
Review:
AMERICAN CYBORG: STEEL WARRIOR is yet another science-fiction tale about the future of the human race based on the battle to end all battles. Set seventeen years after the nuclear war, this story's thin plot centers around the need for Mary (Nichole Hansen) to make it to the ocean with her fetus so that a boat can take it to Europe to re-start the human race. A rather nasty Cyborg has been given the order to kill Mary and her child. However, the Cyborg didn't count on Austin, a Daniel Day-Lewis look-alike who can absorb all the kicks, wallopings and trouncings the Cyborg can deliver. Mary and Austin encounter various obstacles en route to their destination but still manage to get the fetus to the ship just in time to place it in an "external womb" in which it will be brought to Europe where it will continue the human race.
The film is long on action and short on thought. It is crippled by excessive darkness of lighting which obscures rather than enhances the action, cheap special effects, jarring editing, claustrophobic sets, repetitive music, and stilted performances. The movie also contains a quite obvious parallel to Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and Mary, the mother of the test-tube fetus; however, this parallel not only stretches credulity, but also reveals a lack of understanding of the real Baby who became the authentic Savior of the human race.
OCTOBER 12 VHS MOVIE REVIEW : AMERICAN CYBORG (1993)
From explosiveaction.com
Tagline: Their battle will decide the fate of the human race... forever.
Movie Review: I liked Joe Lara's work in my last review, Armstrong, where he played the bad guy known only as "Ponytail". He was good in the role of a terrorist nutter so I wanted to see more of what he could do. Going through my recent acquisitions I realised I already had another - American Cyborg: Steel Warrior! And what's more it's a Cannon movie, so it's bound to be fantastic.
It's a post-apocalyptic Terminator style future. We are informed by a voiceover that seventeen years ago (we don't actually know when this movie is set) there was a nuclear war in which the machines won and enslaved the surviving humans. Sound familiar?. We are allowed to live out the rest of our days in run-down cities run by The System, and as all the women are now sterile there won't be any more of us to continue the species.
But as always with us pesky humans, you just can't stop us from trying to breed. Scientists at work in an underground lab have successfully gotten a girl Mary (Nicole Hansen) pregnant and are now keeping her foetus in a jar to grow. I don't know why she couldn't keep it in her own jar (wink wink) but that's science for you - always making the simple difficult. The scientists are prepping a team of soldiers to take the foetus in a boat to Europe where humans have had better luck in overthrowing their new cyber-overlords and a healthier gene pool exists. The map indicates they will go to the port only a few clicks away and hop on board a boat.
Meanwhile a cyborg with bleach-blond hair and a bikers jacket (John Saint Ryan) receives orders from a computer kiosk in the street by plugging his finger into an outlet. The orders are to find and exterminate the human rebels. Somehow he locates the hidden lab and smashes his way in, blowing up everyone in his path with a huge machine gun. Mary and one other girl escape through the tunnels of the lab on to the street, but the cyborg follows and kills Mary's associate. Mary gets away but the cyborg retrieves the map from the dead girl and now knows where Mary is heading. It chases her through one of many abandoned factories in the movie but she manages to elude it again and drop an engine on its head. Problem solved.
As she continues on to the port she is rumbled by a gang of sailors and transvestites. As she is about to be done in, a knife is thrown into the back of one of the thugs. Joe Lara (as 'Austin') appears and doing his best Van-Damme-in-Cyborg impression (of which this movie owes a huge debt) deals with all the degenerates swiftly and rescues Mary. Mary asks for his assistance in getting to the port but he politely declines "Pardon me lady, I have business to do." and goes to trade items at a local pawn shop. Mary manages to discretely tag along, but that only attracts the cyborg who has returned from the dead to finish her off. It's all very Terminator cat-and-mouse, and Austin manages to temporarily defeat the cyborg by stabbing it in the neck. The cyborg bleeds white goop just like the Bishop androids do and Mary and Austin escape into the sewers. Mary ultimately convinces Austin to stay with her by lying to him that waiting at the port is a shipment of radiation sickness drugs.
For a rip-off of quite a few post-apocalyptic movies, this is a pretty fun ride. I really don't know why it only has a 2.3 rating on IMDB, it's worthy of at least a 5 (or a solid 7 in bad-action ratings). Joe Lara is good in his role as Austin and John Saint Ryan plays as convincing a cyborg as Schwarzenegger does. He uses his glowing techno-eyes to detect footprint heat signatures and can even self repair, though his voice is more like a Cyberman and less like an Austrian. Mary holds her own against the cyborg just as well as Austin does.
The movie goes on like this for a while - cyborg attacks, Austin and Mary kill it and escape, cyborg comes to life again - until Mary is captured by cannibals known as 'leeches' who have an Asteroids upright arcade cabinet for some reason (at least something good survived the nuclear holocaust). The cannibals are a bit like humanoid CHUDs and are eager to taste Mary, but Austin busts in and blows them all to hell. Then they have a romantic moment ("You've never been kissed before?").
There's plenty of action, shootouts and running around in abandoned warehouses and factories but there are not many laughs (except for the sailor muggers). There is a very nice soundtrack, which I don't usually say of 80's movies. It's a dark electro-classical-synth thing with choral chanting parts; it really suits the glum atmosphere of the movie well. The plot has been done before but I don't care, I get a kick out of these movies, particularly their dirty, broken industrial worlds filled with neon lights and hookers and smoke emanating from sewers. Think of this as Hardware on an even lesser budget. It's a Canon movie so by rights it's awesome, and one of the producers worked on JCVD's Cyborg, so that should help you align your expectations. Some of cinematography is really good too and I liked the use of drab colours contrasted with badly placed blue neon lighting tubes.
American Cyborg is ridiculous but is far more deserving of a better IMDB rating than this piece of shit. Another good one for Joe Lara.
The Video: This Thai DVD is pretty good quality, with a nice anamorphic print and generally clean audio (although I heard some clipping every now and then when people were shouting). The R1 I believe is only fullscreen so this disc is definitely a step up. The only issue is the manufacturers forgot to mark the video anamorphic bit, meaning that your equipment can't automatically work out if it's widescreen or not. All you need to do is go into your DVD setup and force 16:9 display. A bit annoying but nothing that can't be solved.
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